Wednesday, September 21, 2016

When you are done checking out this card can you pass the syrup?

I have posted a few Bee Hive cards over the years and while I will never ever chase this set, I do love the cards and have gone looking for a couple over the years. I have nearly all the Delvecchio ones except the one very very rare Group 3 one and now I have his former goaltender.

1944-1963 Bee Hive Group 2 Terry Sawchuk (Stick blade cropped)

The card isn't in mint condition but I would consider this very respectable and the backside is clean and adhesive free which is pretty uncommon given the fact many of these cards were glued into albums of some kind.

What is interesting about a set that spanned nearly 20 years is whenever a player got traded, they just slapped a new photo and kept pumping out cards. Terry Sawchuk had three versions come out during this set. One is super rare and is worth 4 figures and they other two have been produced in large enough quantities that their value is rather small compared to the significance of the player and the age of the card. Whether the blade has been cropped or not doesn't matter much to me because in either case I believe this was the photo used to make this card:

The photo of his rookie and the Bee Hive appear to have come from the same original photo which is pretty awesome in my opinion and adds to the cool factor of the Bee Hive card. Some day I hope to track down a nice Sawchuk rookie for my Parkhurst project and have both of these cards in my hand at the same time.

For those who have never seen these before, here is one version of the checklist that you would use to mail away for your Bee Hive "card".

The back side looks like this:

What is neat about the checklist is it would change and players would be added, altered or subtracted from the list as the years would go by. The source I grabbed these photos from claim it's from the 1962 Season. If you look closely, poor Terry's last name is spelled incorrectly as "Sawchuck". Definitely not the last time that's happened.

As far as my future goes with collecting this set I would like to add a few more players and perhaps a checklist before I would say I'm all done. Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull are must haves I believe and I wouldn't mind getting a few other players who were born in Fort William/Port Arthur aka Thunder Bay before I am going to say I'm done with Bee Hives.

Do you have any Bee Hives in your collection? Have you ever had the syrup? It's fantastic on waffles if you haven't tried it yet. Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks Commish! I'd love to hear which one you have or see a post about it someday. I agree, they are pretty fantastic to have. Just wish they were more storage friendly, I am using 8x10 top loaders which isn't the most attractive storage-wise.

I've yet to acquire one of these but I drool every time I see one posted somewhere. That one in particular is just flat out amazing Dave, I can't imagine how cool that oversized beauty must look in-hand. I second Commishbob, truly an awesome collectible!